Thursday, 12 September 2013

The wind that fixes the Ravens there is the wind that pushes
the tops of waves over, picks up the scent of salt and the stench of manure and
crushed crab fertiliser, and takes it to the gulls circling overhead like
vultures.

The path to the cliffs is a rough track over damp grassy
ground, becoming steadily bleaker as it extends out of the bays either side.
Westray is an isolated Orcadian isle, the most north-westerly of them all, and
the ferry from Kirkwall takes as long as the ferry from the mainland did in the
first place. On the bus to Pierowall – the main village – we hardly lost sight
of the sea. But if sea explains islands, it’s the wind that characterises them.
It is the wind that carves the cliffs at Noup Head into the serrated stack of
sandstone they are today.

But the wind purifies too.

I stood on the clifftop after a walk that felt longer than
it looked, close enough to the edge to worry my mother. The salt and sand and
wind that grinds down rock over millennia was gentle on me, rubbing away the
tiredness accumulated from early starts and fitful nights in tents. With a wind
like this I feel you can breathe again, properly. I can feel more than just air
reaching down into the furthest alveoli. I feel the unexpected ecstasy of fresh
air again.

And with the ecstasy, the fear. This is not a towering
cathedral of rock but one that plummets, sheer, to the jagged rocks and white
chaos of waves below. And I feel a twinge of the old vertigo that inflicts dad
and lurks in me. My friend inched to the edge on hands on knees to peer over an
overhang. I couldn’t bring myself to get more than a foot closer. Sweaty palms
and leaden feet. Vision takes on the peculiarly sharp yet disorientated feel,
as if your retina was an unspooling, like a tape measure, into a distance
fathomable only by fear.

I stand back. Admire the naturally fearless Gannets folding
themselves up and falling headfirst into the water at speed, emerging with a
fish and returning to its identical sandstone ledge with its near identical chick;
and repeating this with clockwork regularity, clockwork efficiency.

I stand back. Admire the view – greater than 180 degrees –
of sea in almost every direction. The most northerly I have been and to the eye
just sea beyond.